Category Archives: Church Planting

Desert Like a Rose by Peter Leithart

First Things has published a thoughtful article by Peter Leithart regarding missions and culture. I encourage everyone interested in understanding how missions should be done in light of various cultures to read this article. It addresses the issue of compromise and the gospel and much more. Enjoy!

A Rose in the Wind

Excerpt:

Time was when Christian missions occurred “over there.” Every now and then, the missionary would show up at church dressed like a time traveler, to show slides of exotic places and to enchant the stay-at-homes with tales about the strange diet and customs of the natives. Foreign missions still happen, but that model seems like ancient history. With the new immigration and the increased ease of travel and communication, the mission field has moved into the neighborhood, and every church that has its eyes open is asking every day how to do “foreign missions.”

That poses a problem. Missions has always been the place where the bookish question of “Christ and culture” turns practical. Now, at the same time that missions has become a challenge “right here,” multiculturalists question the very legitimacy of missions. Since the gospel always comes clothed in culture, how, on the premises of multiculturalism, can missionary work be anything but a veiled form of cultural imperialism? From Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to Barbara Kingsolver’s Poisonwood Bible, missionaries are depicted as tools of Western hegemony. But, if we’re all missionaries now, are we all cooperating in genocide?

Under the regime of multiculturalism, mission efforts face a cruel dilemma. Either missionaries can preach an uncompromising gospel that will cause everything to fall apart, or they can soft pedal the gospel of God’s judgment and grace in order to permit non-Christian cultures to survive. But is the situation as dire as this? Does the Bible perhaps offer a model for re-conceiving the question in a way that avoids the unhappy choice between compromise and cultural cataclysm?

The answer, I think, is yes. [Continue…]

Fellowship of Mere Christianity

This is a great new fellowship that I hope and pray will do more to unite Christians under one name and banner. I found out about it from P. Andrew Sandlin here. Please visit their site and see what they are up to. Pray for the first meeting in Texas and hope for more things like this to succeed and grow the Church’s important doctrine of catholicity.

Here is their purpose:

Continue reading Fellowship of Mere Christianity

Update on Driscoll/Hybel Situation

I always want to have clear and accurate information. Thankfully Matt Payne posted a comment on my previous entry….

He attended the conference that Mark Driscoll’s video was sent to and afterwards was able to get a copy of the video along with many other people who wanted it.

I trust that Mark’s story was sincere, but I’m not quite sure that everything Mark said about the event is accurate.

Thanks Matt!

Also, Matt, could you please further elaborate on the things that Bill Hybels said about the video and why he didn’t like it?

Someone needs to put the “Smackdown” on SOMEONE?

Correction: Please see the post after this post, along with its comments, for a clearer picture of what took place at this church planters conference regarding the Mark Driscoll video. I honestly do not want to say anything else about Mark because I trust he was sincere in his post. But after the diligence of some who were involved with the conference, I believe that my original post is no longer accurate or proper. I hope that the record can be set straight on this issue. Thanks again for all the comments.

– Glenn

========================= 

Well, it’s official, Bill Hybelsjust made a very stupid decision. I will not comment about any other things regarding Dr. Hybels since I do not know much about him, but I will comment about something I know he did that was wrong.

Mark Driscoll has just made it known, this weekend, what happened with the 8 minutes video he was asked to make for a church planting conference in Florida. Some 5,000 copies were sent to the conference for distribution to all attendees. Unfortunately, Bill Hybels did not like the video when it was shown and (the video having been well received by the audience) proceeded to castigate the video for its lack of recognition… of WOMEN church planters! After this, the organization hosting the conference decided not to hand out any of the videos.

Therefore, at the bottom of this post, you will find the video that Mark posted on YouTube for everyone to see since none of the copies were allowed to be distributed. You can read about this story from the horses mouth.

By the way, I really loved the video and I fully believe that Mark Driscoll said what those church planters needed to hear. I can only hope that God will teach Bill Hybels a lesson for his egalitarian non-sense and blaspheming of God’s written word. Titus 2:4-5: “train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be reviled.”